Apple says people send as many as 200,000 iMessages per second

Apple's iMessage handles an absurd amount of messages: sometimes as many as 200,000 per second, according to Apple services boss Eddy Cue.

The stat was revealed during a podcast with Daring Fireball's John Gruber published on Friday.

"The scale for this is truly amazing because of the usage, I mean [people] rely on these [services] for their lives," Cue said. "We peak out at 200,000 messages a second that are sent on messages for example."

At peak rates, that would work out to 63 quadrillion messages per year. In 2014, CEO Tim Cook said that Apple handles 40 billion iMessages per day.